• Archive of all Poetry Space showcases
Guest Editor- Janet Sutherland
Featured image: Chris Sims
Janet Sutherland has three collections with Shearsman Books, most recently Bone Monkey. Her fourth collection, Home Farm, will be published in January 2019 also from Shearsman Books. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Poetry Review, New Humanist, London Magazine, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review and The Spectator. She received a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2018 and won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition. Her website is at janetsutherland.co.uk
Guest Editor’s Overview:
It’s always a pleasure to read poetry, each poem an opening into the mind of another, each doing its best to reflect what its maker intended. I was so pleased to be asked to select ten poems for Poetry Space for the winter showcase. There was a huge variety of work and my choices are of course, idiosyncratic— another poet would have selected differently so, if yours doesn’t appear here this time, keep reading, keep writing, keep sending out.
Enjoy the selection, then please scroll down for the comments from Janet for each poem. Please note that copyright for all poems Please do not reproduce without permission. SJS
The Magic of Writing
I write and write to arrive
Hoping these words get to you,
In some magical way
Set it, the paper heated, aflame.
To reach you via spiritual aspect
From the material of wood, carbon,
Ink, the natural elements.
To get it to you through my touch
To the other side of the walls,
Where you don’t belong,
There for no reason, keep you ill.
When you are not, and me away,
Under duress and threats,
State authorities, bullies’ enemies,
Demon Nazi home wreckers’ hell.
And your people too, all are wrong
You are not mad, they are confused,
Between genius and madness,
Stalking abusing us to prove it.
So, these words go out for you in air,
So, reach your mind, sustain your soul,
To nourish you with love and Joy,
Through the pleasure of touch
Of ink on paper, symbolism from it.
All to touch your heart, your being
With that magical earth brush
To join us to the spirit of the world.
For we can make whatever we like
With our quill and ink, as it reaches out
To stain you, the world, beautifully,
To touch you, as what is wrongly
denied
To us my love is returned, restored.
Sam Khan-McIntyre
UK
Winter sunlight
Shadows are long and lean
and very black
making their hand-in-hand way
along a sunlit road.
They mingle and two-step
with tree shapes
twisting and twirling
to the music of a blue wind.
A clear white-cold light
scars the eyes, blinding
the staid walkers as, slowly,
they re-trace Strictly steps.
They remember Balling
the Jack, long-gone nights
in black tie, long black frocks,
hearts and feet in perfect time.
Now they shadow-dance with
black trees, keeping in step,
jiving, waltzing, fox-trotting
into the shimmer of winter.
Moira Andrew
UK
To mark our time
I would give you something permanent,
not to claim you,
but to mark this time as ours.
Perhaps a ring,
unbroken circle,
to be taken off at times of your choosing:
when you’re using tools;
working wood;
when I’m gone.
Inside, the words
for when we loved,
like a circle drawn around dates on a calendar.
Pat Edwards
UK
Cormorant, Starfish, Seagull
Needles of fine rain prick my skin,
sandpipers spear banks for scraps of protein
as I stop with my dog by the sea wall
to watch a silent maritime melodrama:
the dark pterodactyl head and shoulders
of a cormorant surface, break
the water’s skin, struggle to swallow
a large russet starfish whose five legs
wriggle like a baby’s fingers.
I throw a stone, a stab at flimsy rescue
but the ocean raptor rapt on his prey
still tries to force down his unwieldy meal.
A seagull, sharp-eyed raider, swoops,
hovers and grabs a leg until a still life
of bird-starfish-bird forms,
suspended between sea and air,
hunger binding them.
The razor-shell-billed robber
takes off with its warty feast
as the water’s broken mirror
becomes whole again.
Annest Gwilym
UK
Cabbage White
In his robe of sun he cartwheels
over autumn weeds –
a last-fling pale ballerina
among the Caravaggio opulence
of October
and its red-haired children.
This petal-light cabbage white
flits among heady colours
distilled by autumn:
root beer, cider, burgundy, rosé.
He goes there, there, there –
from ragwort to herb robert,
catsear to hawkbit.
November brings brown,
sours ripe and fruity scents,
pungent with leaf mould and fungi.
A watery sun rises low;
branches like swipes of ink
on an eau-de-nil sky;
his lifeless body blowing about
in the wind with the leaves.
Annest Gwilym
UK
Devastation of eyesight
Dusk on the Cyclades –
tamarisks, sea drawn by wind.
Margarita Serafimova
Bulgaria
Bonfire
The punk-haired goddess Fire
is scissoring out
the souls of the sober elements:
flaking off their chains,
they bundle up
the helter-skelter of the air
to enter, one by one,
oblivion, each sucking
a last desperate cigarette.
Along the scorched rim
she clones herself
in tiny dancing sprites;
The smoky air is filled
with the fatty crackle
of her self-applause
and the bonfire
sags, collapses
like tenements of war.
Anthony Watts
UK
Somehow
Listen: from the frenzy of fiddles & a squeezebox
the thud of a bodhran
a tune rises
somehow
fights its way through
to hands snapping knotted handkerchiefs
to my feet
to tatters in a flurry:
day night black red white—
no catwalk strutting show but steps hurrying
danced down
as if a many-coloured spool unwound,
unreeled itself down generations
from once-beating hearts
now long-buried deep
in Cotswolds’ red earth
in Dorset greensand
or in the howling rocky borderlands
never to be stamped down
never not even by Lancashire clogs.
So today I race the reel
chin raised
double-stepping
& I’m lifted to life
in the drum & thrum of blood
in the caper of ribbons & bells
raised in the burst
of strings & bows, lungs & bellows
risen to the skip
the leap
of feet
here I wear the skin of dancing ancestors
their tatters coats upon my shoulders
like a shaman’s cloak
somehow I have become the earth beneath my feet
the beating music
somehow I am the dance
I am my own forebears
somehow I am not lone, not young, not old,
but somehow forever alive.
Lizzie Ballagher
UK
Duck Lady
Downtown Philly on Market Street:
the Duck Lady drags her weight of bags
her clumps of cardboard
& quacks
to all who listen, fearful;
or cross to the other side
or turn down Fifteenth
to where plane, osage & chestnut trees
have lost their boulevard leaves
but subway-surface cars clank reassuringly
all the way to the terminus.
Grey: it’s tombstone grey in Center City—
concrete blocks
cracked sidewalk paving slabs
winter faces seamed & pinched
the silver savagery of cars sliding by in
a deadly hush
but for the Duck Lady quacking
in resplendent scarlet—a coat
someone at Arch Street’s Salvation Army
must have given her
now winter’s got the city by the throat
& cops are clearing
vagrants off the steam vents
winos out of hotel doorways & chasing
roaches & rats back down the sewer shafts.
And I’m on the bus right after work
hefting my own weight of bags
& hearing the Duck Lady quack, still quack
so later when I’m almost home
shivering in the minus-twenty frost
I can’t stop thinking of the Duck Lady
in her vermillion finery.
Lizzie Ballagher
UK
Where I’m From
I am from Matchbox
From those little cars that would capture my attention for hours
I am from the wood chips at nearby playgrounds
(Brown, sharp,
Crunching beneath my feet.)
I am from the Rose bush
Whose thorns and limbs protected my grandmother’s house
From our Wiffle balls
I am from hamburgers and hotdogs
From Ed and Frank
I am from the play-it-alls,
And the learn-it-alls,
I am from Stop Yelling! And Keep Reading!
I am from piles of books
And endless sun
I am from the Oasis and Kaldis,
Homemade bagels and strong coffee.
I am from my grandfather’s chair
Where he debates me,
And usually wins
I am from Nerf and Lego
Cars and trucks,
Strewn below my bed like shells
On a seashore.
I am from these places and things
That shaped my memory
Into something good.
Kurt Gundlach
USA (aged 17)
Inspired by “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon
Editor’s Notes – Janet Sutherland
The first three poems reflect deeply on relationships and on love.
The Magic of Writing
The first line of this poem embodies the energy of the language, the urgency of the thought “I write and write to arrive”. The poem has a wonderful physicality imagining the words of a letter to someone who is deeply loved, the words so strong that they can arrive by some spiritual or magical means taking the sender with them through the very walls of an institution to the one who is loved.
Winter sunlight
This poem takes us deep into winter shadows and into the winter years as we follow a couple hand in hand on a winter walk. Old dances are recalled in the shadows dancing in a blue wind. I liked the phrase “a clear white-cold light scars the eyes” describing that low-slung intense light of winter.
To mark our time
There is something very moving about the premise of this poem, the poet makes clear a ring is not about ownership, it is “not to claim you” but to mark the time as “ours” and the ring can be taken off for practical reasons or “when I’m gone”, it is “like a circle drawn round dates on a calendar”.
Two poems from a poet closely describing the natural world.
Cormorant, Starfish, Seagull
Intense observation and a narrative form take the reader to the coast in this poem, right into the “needles of fine rain” and to a fight between two birds for the starfish grabbed by them both. It is a dramatic narrative in which the sea is the fourth protagonist, it’s skin first broken, then restored.
Cabbage White
This poem is also wonderfully descriptive and evocative of nature and autumn, the “Caravaggio opulence” of October with its “red-haired children” an original way to describe the autumn leaves set against the November corpse of the butterfly, itself like a leaf in the wind.
Two strongly visual poems follow:
Devastation of eyesight
A powerful visual two-line metaphor simply reflects off the title of this poem and gives it tremendous power. The reader can both see the image of the dusk on the Cyclades and see how it can be used as metaphor for failing eyesight. That beauty can be devastating is also implied. Wonderful brevity.
Bonfire
The poem has a regular three-line stanza structure and is a celebration of “the punk-haired goddess Fire” who is “scissoring out the souls of the sober elements” —a gloriously elegant description of fire and the material it burns.
The final three poems reflect on different memories, of dance, of winter in Philadelphia and then of childhood.
Somehow
“Here I wear the skin of dancing ancestors” the poet says, allowing the poem to leap about on the page and let us hear the “frenzy of fiddles and a squeezebox” so that the body is somehow outside time. The layout echoes the dance and the energy of the beat and the music.
Duck Lady
The poem describes a bag lady in Philadelphia who is called Duck Lady because of her quacking. There is a richness of detail in the poem which sets it firmly in the states in the dead cold of a bitter winter. It’s not ‘till near the end of the poem that the poet says, “And I’m on the bus right after work/ hefting my own weight of bags” that you, the reader, are right there too with the “I” of the poem, listening to the Duck Lady in her vermillion coat in the minus-twenty frost.
Where I’m From
This lovely childhood memory poem details the elements of the poet’s childhood through toys, food, and family and we are taken there via touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. The poem relies on the repeated phrase “I am from” varying long and short lines of specific memories such as the “cars and trucks/ strewn below my bed like shells”.
Please note the copyright for all poems and images remains with their creators.
Please note that Janet chose the poems anonymously The order they appear in the showcase does not reflect any preference.
